Eight Minutes

Content note: This post discusses the impact of social media on girls’ mental health including eating disorders and self-worth. No suicide content.

Eight minutes. That's the number for the girls.

Last week I wrote about the boys. Twenty three minutes for the algorithm to start feeding a thirteen year old boy woman-hating filth he never went looking for. I thought that was the worst stopwatch I'd read for a long time. It wasn't.

Because the same machine had one running on the girls the whole time. Researchers set up blank accounts as thirteen year old girls. Liked a couple of videos about how they looked and how they felt, the normal stuff. Eight minutes later TikTok was serving them eating disorder content. Thinspo. How to starve yourself. Eight minutes. [1]

So while we were all busy being frightened about what the internet is doing to our sons, it was quietly working on our daughters too. From both directions at once. And almost nobody is talking about that second half of it.

The boys it builds don't stay on a screen.

The boy who spent twenty three minutes being taught that a girl is a thing, he doesn't live in her phone. He sits next to her in maths. He is in her group chat. He is the one in her DMs. The lesson the machine taught him, she's the one who collects it.

Five years ago Ofsted went into schools and actually asked the children. Nearly nine in ten girls said they or their friends were sent explicit pictures they didn't want to see. More than nine in ten had been called something sexual. Most of them had been pressured to send a naked photo of themselves. Not a few of them. Almost all of them. And the children told the inspectors it was so normal they didn't bother reporting it any more. [2]

That was before the next thing arrived. Because now a girl doesn't even have to be tricked into sending anything. A boy can take a photo off her Instagram, run it through one of the AI "nudify" apps on his phone, and have her stripped naked in seconds. A fake, made by AI. But it's her face, and it's good enough to humiliate her, and it's good enough to go round the whole school by lunchtime. Ninety nine percent of these fake images are of girls and women. Thirteen percent of teenagers in this country have already come across them in their own schools. Girls of fourteen. Some as young as eleven. [3]

It got so bad that at the start of this year men were openly using one of these tools, built right into a social media app, to undress real women and girls in their photos and post them straight back, in public, instantly. Schools here have started taking children's faces off their own websites. Off the sports day photo. Off the prize-giving. Because a name and a face is now enough raw material for a stranger to build abuse out of. [3][7]

And it gets even worse.

The boys get told they're owed the whole world. The girls get told by the same machine to shrink themselves until they're worth wanting.

This is from the industry's own research, the stuff they fought to keep buried. Instagram's own people found that a third of teenage girls who already felt bad about their bodies felt worse after using it. Seventeen percent said their eating disorder got worse. A third of girls felt extreme pressure to look perfect on there. One of their own internal slides, written by their own staff, said it out loud: we make body image issues worse for one in three teenage girls. They knew. They wrote it down. They carried on anyway. [4]

So a girl opens the same app her brother is on. He's being fed dominance. She's being fed her own face, filtered into something that doesn't exist, lined up next to a hundred others, with a number underneath telling her how she measures up. She's being sold how to be smaller. How to be "that girl" who is up at five with the flat stomach and the perfect skin. How to be a "high value woman," which always, always means quieter, prettier, more pleasing. The boys are taught to take up the whole room. The girls are taught to apologise for the space they already take. Same machine. Same week. Opposite lessons.

And we all know where this ends up.

Well over half of teenage girls in the US, where they've been measuring it the longest, now say they feel persistently sad or hopeless. That has nearly doubled in a decade. [5] That's not teenage girls being dramatic. That's a generation of girls being quietly ground down by something built to grind them, and then being called too sensitive when they say it out loud.

I have a daughter. She's nearly a teenager. And I wrote a poem a while back, about her, where I said the thing I keep coming back to. That I can hold the door shut as hard as I like, but it doesn't come through the door. It comes through everything else. Friends and screens and shops and songs, a thousand tiny messages a day, seeping in like water through a membrane. Slow and certain and unstoppable.

That's the bit that keeps me awake. I can't stand between her and all of it. A man already made her wipe the glitter off her face in a car park when she was eleven, like her sparkle was an invitation. The machine will do a version of that to her ten thousand times before she leaves school, and most of it I'll never even see.

So yes. I've locked my two older ones down to nothing. No social media. No WhatsApp. The boys, so the machine can't build them into something monstrous. And one day my girl, so it can't quietly convince her she's the problem that needs fixing. I'm frightened from both directions, because I'm raising both.

But here's where it turns, same as last week. The ground is moving. Fast.

Making a fake naked image of someone is now a crime in this country, with prison attached. [6] Earlier this month the Prime Minister told the tech giants that children's phones have to block this stuff by September or face new laws. [7] The tool that was stripping women on that app is being investigated. The regulators here have the platforms on the clock over child safety. [7]

And now the big one. This week the Prime Minister announced a ban on under sixteens using social media. TikTok. Instagram. Snapchat. YouTube. Facebook. X. Reddit. Threads. Twitch. Kick. Off limits for children, with the job of enforcing it put on the companies and not the kids. And it goes further than Australia, with a night-time curfew to stop older teenagers scrolling into the small hours, limits on AI chatbots, and restrictions on some gaming features too. A hundred and sixteen thousand people answered the consultation, the most for anything since equal marriage, and the vast majority of them, children included, wanted exactly this. [8]

I'll be honest. I didn't fully believe it would come, and never this strong. So credit where it's due. This is the biggest thing any government here has done about any of it, and it happened because people refused to shut up. Mostly women. Mostly mothers. Families who lost children and wouldn't go quietly.

But a ban on paper is not a ban in a child's bedroom. The companies will wriggle and stall the way they did in Australia, so I'll believe the strength of it when I see it enforced, not just announced.

And notice who slipped the net. Roblox. Millions of children on it, grooming warnings stacking up around the world, and it's nowhere on that list, because it gets to call itself a game. The category protected it. That isn't an oversight, it's a loophole, and the next harm always pours straight through the gap they leave.

And here's what even this doesn't touch. Everything I just spent this whole piece on. The comparison. The filtered face. The body whittled down to a number. None of that is illegal. None of it is banned. And the day a girl turns sixteen the whole machine is still there waiting, exactly as it was, just with a birthday between her and it. An age wall is not the same as making the thing safe. It buys our daughters a few years. It doesn't dismantle a single gear of what's grinding them down.

None of it is enough. But a year ago none of it was even on the table.

Because the girls don't need fixing. They're not too sensitive. They're not too much. They are the most watched, most rated, most surveilled generation of girls in history, and they're reacting exactly the way any human being would react to that. The thing that needs fixing is the machine. And the men who built it. And the comfortable silence that let them.

I'm currently finishing a painting in my studio. A girl lifted from a children's book, 2008, surrounded by everything they were selling her. How to look beautiful tomorrow. How to get prettier feet. How to be the best cheerleader. I used to think those books were a relic. They're not. The phone says the exact same things now, two hundred times a day, except now it can say them using her own face, stripped bare, without her permission.

Not the boys. Not the girls. Not one more.

The receipts

1. Blank accounts set up as thirteen year old girls in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, which paused on and liked videos about body image and mental health, were served eating disorder content within around eight minutes, with the algorithm going on to recommend body image and mental health content as often as every 39 seconds: Center for Countering Digital Hate, "Deadly by Design," December 2022.

2. Nearly 90% of girls said being sent explicit pictures or videos they did not want to see happened "a lot" or "sometimes" to them or their peers, 92% said the same of sexist name-calling, around 80% of girls reported being pressured to send naked images of themselves, and the children described this harassment as so "normalised" they no longer reported it: Ofsted, Review of Sexual Abuse in Schools and Colleges, June 2021.

3. 98% of deepfakes are sexual in nature and 99% depict girls or women, and 13% of teenagers reported having experienced nude deepfakes in British schools, with most school "nudify" cases involving girls aged 14 or under: Internet Matters, 2024. A further 19% of confirmed reports of nude or sexual imagery of children to the UK's Report Remove helpline involved AI-altered or "nudified" content: Internet Watch Foundation, 2025.

4. Instagram's own internal research found that 32% of teen girls who already felt bad about their bodies felt worse after using it, 17% said their eating disorder got worse, and 34% felt extreme pressure to look perfect on the app; a 2019 internal company slide stated, "we make body-image issues worse for one in three teenage girls": Meta internal research, March 2020, revealed in the Wall Street Journal "Facebook Files," September 2021, via whistleblower Frances Haugen.

5. 57% of US teenage girls reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in 2021, up from 36% in 2011: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Youth Risk Behavior Survey, published February 2023.

6. Creating a sexually explicit deepfake image of someone without their consent has been made a criminal offence in England and Wales, with offenders facing prison: UK government, 2025.

7. Following the misuse of an AI tool built into a social media platform to "undress" real women and girls in late 2025 and early 2026 (now under regulatory investigation), the Prime Minister told technology firms at London Tech Week they have until September to stop children being sent and shown sexually explicit images, including AI-generated ones, or face new laws, while Ofcom and the Information Commissioner's Office continue enforcement action on child safety: reported June 2026.

8. The Prime Minister announced a ban on under-16s using social media, applying to TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, YouTube, Snapchat, Threads, Twitch, Kick and Reddit, and going further than Australia's ban with additional measures including a night-time curfew for older teenagers, restrictions on AI chatbots and on some gaming app features, with enforcement placed on the platforms rather than children or parents; the move followed a government consultation that drew around 116,000 responses, the most since the 2012 equal marriage consultation, with the vast majority, including young people, backing an under-16 ban: Associated Press and The Times / Sunday Times, June 2026.

Too much in my head, so I write. So I paint. So I refuse to be quiet.